Vitalik Buterin confirms $15M Worth of Spam Transaction

Congestion in Ethereum network caused by spam transaction, cost worth of $15 million

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Founder) spoke about a mysterious congestion of transactions took place on the Ethereum network. Buterin estimated in a message posted on his Twitter accountyesterday (17th July) that the recent spate of ERC-20 smart contract transactions, which seemingly serve no purpose upon inspection, have cost the creators of these transactions over $15 million.

The congestion resulting from this influx of transactions has raised the average transaction price on the network to nearly $1. Most of the transactions in question do not have an apparent reason to be broadcasted, sending trivial tokens with little utility or evidence of a business behind them. They appear to be randomly sending funds between contracts or airdropping tokens that don’t even have a website to represent them.

The topic fueled discussion on Twitter as to the originators of the transaction spam. A widely shared suggestion was from Ethereum dev Justo, who – in an interview with Trustnodes – said that it was his and his colleagues’ prediction and belief that EOS was intentionally spamming the Ethereum network with fake transactions in order to make their own network seem more efficient by comparison.

“Myself, and many other high profile ethereum application developers made a prediction that EOS would in all likelihood, attempt to attack the eth network gas prices to validate the launch of their platform. Without fail, every day up until the launch of the EOS platform, which was June 6th, gas prices increased due to ‘Airdrop’ tokens. Thousands of random tokens, with no website, or bootstrapped template websites made in hours. Wasting hundreds of Ethereum daily, hundreds of thousands of dollars to drop tokens. This happened up until the launch of EOS, on the 6th, then immediately stopped. In one day, gas prices dropped back to normal.”

Response From EOS

Dan Larimer, CTO of Block.one (the largest EOS mining operation),said that he“can assure you block one wouldn’t be so stupid to spend our resources attacking ETH when all it takes is crypto kitties,” elaborating that “there are far smarter and more cost-effective ways at bringing ETH down if that were the goal.”